Descending Star

MAP ROOM

Colleen worked at the river edge, with the Cullens' house a shadowed mass in the distance set against a black artificial treeline. She had set her oils and liniments in a semicircle around the enormous easel. The top clamp, fully extended, secured a twelve foot by four foot canvas. She was dressed in denim jeans and a baggy cotton sweatshirt, work clothes, the coarse attire of a laborer, for that was what she was, and what she had always been, since deep within the lost annals of prehistory: an artisan, millennia before the invention of wallpaper, when art had been a commodity, purely utilitarian. She sat cross-legged atop an eight foot folding ladder. She held a palette laden with blue and white, under rare starlight accentuated by the high sliver of a new moon.

She held her brush by the tip of the two foot long handle. The hammered copper ferrule gripped a fistful of thick, coarse horsehair bristles. On the uppermost reaches of the canvas, she dabbed sun washed blue around the perimeters of scattered clouds.

Alice and Jasper stopped at the easel and looked up at the composition, which incongruously depicted not a single tree. If Colleen was painting a landscape, she had an entirely different place in mind. The topmost sliver of sky broke on a hard horizontal plane. The rest of the canvas, more than eleven feet of height, was dominated by gray, waterstained blocks. There could be no indication of their size, there being no other reference frames. The rectangles could have represented cinderblock, diminutive tile, or stacked monoliths large as skyscrapers.

Colleen glanced down at her audience without curiosity. The pair wore black waterproof nylon, with hoods and tethered sunglasses. They had dufflebags on their shoulders. They were evidently headed out, but Colleen expressed no curiosity. She truly possessed none. These Cullens, for an apparently settled enclave, seemed to be constantly on the move, on one inconsequential errand or other. She theorized that they were off once again in search of the poor Germanic infant who had lost his romantic obsession down in Phoenix.

Colleen idly wondered if she should have immolated the infant when she had confronted him on that austere barnacle covered shore on the island off the coast of Alaska. No doubt the Cullens would have appreciated the intervention. Every action, no matter how innocuous in isolation, tended to cascade. Alice could attest to that verity. Even now Colleen watched the talented little fortune teller's perception bifurcate each instant into vast multiverses cluttered with improbable detritus. Yes, they were headed out in search of the feckless wretch, Victor, and even now, prepared to depart and decked out comically in the garb of spies, they harbored misgivings, themselves, ambivalent about their own plan in the midst of execution. Busy, busy, busy, these frenetic Cullens.

The Triad of Thrones often took decades to vote and even longer to render judgment, yet in Colleen's view they acted rashly and impulsively, and imposed themselves recklessly on events.

Alice knew better than to tell Colleen where they were headed. She seemed to know just above everything of consequence. Jasper, however, felt some need to extend the empty courtesy.

"We could be gone for awhile," he informed Colleen.

Colleen pondered the harm that might possibly come of helping them with a compass bearing. She dismissed the notion, twirled the enormous brush into the grip of a pinkie, and with thumb and index finger dabbed white into the blue with a razor-thin spatula.

He went on to explain, perhaps in the forlorn hope of some specific assistance, "There is much about Victor that we don't yet know, tactical details that could aid our pursuit. He has a supply of cell phones. He must jack and re-image them somewhere. He somehow keeps his electronics charged. He has a cash supply. This implies he maintains human aliases. Not to mention the vehicles, which must be stored and regularly serviced. We suspect that he must have cold sites, perhaps many, on the northern latitudes. Jillian led us to one of them. We've destroyed it. We haven't found any others, but when he took the jet from Phoenix, he must have landed it somewhere. And we presume that he must have a home base, a refuge against our own kind, with adequate concealments. As to where that place could be located, we don't have a single clue. We suspect Europe, but in truth we have no idea."